Are Real Time Results Showing for Your Brand?

Last month, there was a pretty important change in Google which allows them to provide in-depth, real time search. That is, Google launched the inclusion of Twitter results (and others) into the SERPS (search engine results pages). Yahoo has also announced that they are doing the same.

This isn’t happening for every single query. And, we’re trying to determine when it is that Google determines to pull these into the SERPs. Right now it looks like searches on news worthy searches and other large volume queries for large brands. The amount of recent news, Twitter, blog and other mentions seems to also help trigger these results. But lately we are seeing more of this inclusion across many type of search results.

But, for those of you who do not have a Twitter account, and may be a popular “keyword” (that is to say, your brand is a popular keyword), you may want to pay particularly close attention to this.
“Why?” you ask? Here’s the thing…

Let’s say that your brand is “coca cola” (see screenshot).

At any time, someone could be posting something about your brand. You’d have to be a pretty popular brand, but – if you are talked about across the web often enough, you might want to have some Social Media and/or Reputation Management efforts of your own to counter what’s being said.

Vizion’s feelings on this (as well as some peers within the Industry) is that Google (and now Yahoo) will have to find a way to counter spam in this space. Right now, there may be some measures in place by the search engiens preventing someone from spamming the heck out of Twitter and gaining Page 1 real estate for keywords, if only for a few moments, but it is still definitely possible.

Check out a search for SEO (see screenshot) where Vizion President Mark Jackson has easily achieved first page on Google for “SEO”! Is that spam? It certainly could be if desired.
So, I’ll leave you with this…

It’s time to start actively discussing this with your marketing team and put in place systems to monitor your brand for possible issues related to reputation management.